ART.
THE ACADEMY.
VICTORY has not caused shouts of triumph to come from the painters, and on the whole we are glad. Before we can have "England crowned Queen of the see." we must have our Veronese. Inferior allegorical art is intolerable, and we are much better off without it ; and it is a relief to find how few painters have wandered in this direction. One artist haa placed the Kaiser's head on a shield instead of the Gor, on's, and the effect is slightly comic but nothing more. Nor are we wearied beyond bearing with the would-be realistic battle scenes, obviously painted in the studio, which are neither historical statements of fact nor works of art, but remain in that limbo of unsatisfactory things called Academy pictures.
No wise man can now feel that his judgment is anything more than provisional in the case of a serious picture dealing with some deeply moving event of the war. We are so near the time, and remembrance is so poignant, that calm and deliberate criticism cannot yet be made. It is impossible to be sure that other considerations than those which are purely artistic do not enter into the judgment. With this word of caution, let us say at once that Mr. Sargent's great decorative work, Gassed (No. 120), is of a kindwhich leaves a deepimpression on account of the artistic and morel qualities being united into a greatly moving whole. The thing that makes the picture so impressive is its impersonality ; it is thus that Piero della Francesca treated battles, not by painting a collection of indi- viduals highlycharaoterized in all theirefforts and sufferings, but by the creation of a pictorial design which proclaims the central • To extinguish. See New Enlists Dictionary. t. Mr. Squire-is an eloquent apologist of the split infinitive, emotion. If we look at this great canvas from a very long way off through other galleries before we understand its meaning, we see a design which suggests the impassive lines and masses, as it were, of Stonehenge, something elemental and of 'vast import. When we get nearer we see that these forms are those of a slowly passing procession ,moving across the long picture. They all have bandaged eyes, and each man touches the shoulder of the man preceding him to keep his direction on the wooden causeway. In front, and at the side of the group, is the R.A.M.C. orderly who turns quickly to call out some direction to the blinded men. Wonderful is the effect of this action of the man who can see with the swing of -his strong young body, and by his action is brought home to us the condition of the others. If we look for characteristic types, fur individual suffering, for details to dwell upon, we shall be disappointed ; but if we can feel the compelling force of creative design we shall realize that this is no ordinary picture of war incidents, but the expression of the heroic sacrifice of an army. We are gl d that so dignified a work is to form part of the Implied War Museum.
There are of course many pictures of devastated country, and Mr. Hughes-Stanton has made out of the Less,1918 (No. 240) a powerful work in which the finely painted menacing sky is in sympathy with the desolation of the land. As a rule these waste places do not make very impressive pictures, at least when the representation is merely realistic ; and even Mr. Sargent leaves us cold when we look at his ruins of the Cathedral of Arms (No. 103). He treats them more as a still-life piece than as a tragedy.
Mr. Arnesby Brown is to be congratulated on the beauty, accomplishment, and distinction of his landscapes. He has forgotten his very big brushes with their aggressive sweeps, and the gain is great. He has not by so doing lessened the interest of his paint surface ; rather he has increased it, for too obvious methods have given way to a more subtle and beautiful process. Perhaps his best work here is The Line sf the Plough (No. 34). It is as good in colour as it is in rhythmic line, and from the latter quality becomes a self-con- tained whole independent of what lay to right or left of the scene. This is not quite the case with A Village by the Sect (No. 96), which, though it is beautiful in colour, makes us feel that it is a section of a wide view. The painter might have taken in more or less on either hand ; we feel it was there, though no doubt for good reasons he chose what he did. In Amesby Brown's other picture (No. 34) we neither know nor care what else existed. He has given us not a well-selected piece of landscape but an artistic whole, and this is the difference between intelligent copying and creation. Mr. Adrian Stokes wakes in us a longing for the Alps. One especially beautiful work is his Mer de Niutges (No. 565), where he shows great mountains rearing their heads through the mists. The painting of the near white clouds through which the distance is seen, is a piece of work of wonderful accomplishment, so strong yet so subtle. To model form thus, in the very highest tones of white without trick or effort, is masterly. For beauty of colour and charm of unusual composition, Mr. Sargent's San Vigilio (No. 15) Is notable. The little circular harbour in the gem-coloured water of the lake seems more fit for fairy boats than those of mortals. Two other landscapes may be mentioned for the ;attraction of their colour—Mr. J. W. West's Loire (No. 51) and Mr. J. A. Park's beautiful harmony of blues, A Fresh Morning, Loos (No. 308) ; and to these may be added Mr. Olsson's Off the Western Land (No. 198), Mr. Leslie Thompson's The Shadow and the Stream (No. 317), and Mr. Hairy Watson's woodland landscape full of light and beauty.
Portraits arc of course plentiful, but not in such overpowering numbers as they are sometimes. For sheer mastery of a rather hard kind Mr. Sargent remains by himself, and his two works here, Mrs. Dexbury and Daughter (No. 46) and The President of the United States (No. 135), are examples of his familiar style, both enormously competent and arresting, but neither of them raising aesthetic ecstasy.
A picture which does raise this desired feeling—and a work which fails in this has not justified its existence, except on the lower level of a record, or topography—is Mr. Spencer Watson's fresh, invigorating group, The Donkey Bide (No. 285). Here, alter all the tortured lines, complicated colours, and inextricable tones which cover the walls and oppress modern art, the eye can be at rest. The artist has simplified his design till it is lucid and coherent ; his arrangement of light and dark enforces instead of complicating it ; while the clear, luminous colour stimulates and enlivens. Mr. Spencer Watson has recovered some of the authentic inspiration of primitive Italian art ; and he has not done this by copying, but by entering into the spirit of the masters who were the morning stars of modern painting. The artist in this work shows that to be simple and to be on. trammelled by mere realism it is not in the leist necessary to be wilfully unreal. His figures of the mother and child, and also the donkey, are beautifully drawn. The only criticism that suggests itself is that the sky has not that quality of tenderness as well as of light of which the early painters held the secret. Last year Mr. Spencer Watson showed that he had a definite aim in view ; this year he gives us a success which both calms and invigorates, in a world of art full of complicated and often aimless struggle. Mr. Walter Hayes also simplifies his forms and tones until he arrives at a highly learned decorative result. His Pulris et Umbra (No. 564) is not painted for the sake of the wrestlers or the Spanish inn-yard, but for reasonsof abstaract form and colour. The result dominates the small talk of most of the neighbouring pictures by its monumental simplicity, if not by its beauty. But when the artist had so successfully simplified a complex effect of light, why, we wonder, did he complicate it with some purely geometrical patterns arbitrarily distributed? Did he feel that his sense of design was not strong enough to get him away from realism without artificial aids ?
The sculpture remains much what we are accustomed to, and searchers after the perfect realization of a war memorial will be disappointed. The old problems are still unsolved. Sir W. Goscombe John's sketch for Port Sunlight (No. 1,499) presents the old difficulty of realistic figures placed where only unnaturalistic figures could look in place. Of the simpler kinds of memorial there is little to guide public taste. Mr. L. S. Merrifield has modelled a striking portrait of Lieut. F. II'. Palmer, V.C., M.M. (No. 1,484), which suggests by its style that terra-cotta is the true material for its realization, for it has a distinct kinship with Florentine work of that nature.
Among the water-colours we may get pleasure from looking at The Ferry (No. 685), by Mr. C. A. Hunt, and The Somme Valley (No. 804), by Captain W. Longstaff ; and for the tapestry-like fairy-story Mr. Moony's Evening Breeze (No. 720) is delightful.
The difficult job of hanging an Exhibition has been done with great care and success, and all people of taste will note with pleasure the frame of one of Mr. C. Shannon's portraits which is not gold, and which makes a most pleasant contrast with
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